I am proposing a Wiki project for the disambiguation of author names in MEDLINE [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/], an online database of biomedical literature, which is maintained by the National Library of Medicine. This resource contains more than 11 million references and it is used by researchers worldwide.

I am doing this because (1) ambiguous names (like J. Smith) are a problem for certain analyses of the database, (2) the institution developing the database is not considering approaching this problem in the short term, (3) name disambiguation can only be carried by the authors or close colleagues, thus a collaborative project is needed.

See: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiAuthors

I would be glad to have your comments/help.

Thanks, Miguel Andrade